Heaume Mortal - Solstices

I stumbled upon Heaume Mortal in one of my recent Bandcamp explorations and was drawn to it by the gorgeous and visually intriguing abstract landscape painting on the cover of their debut album here, but I am writing about it because I while came for the cover, I stayed for the black metal.
Heaume Mortal is a Parisian trio (from what I can tell on their Bandcamp profile) who have apparently been composing and crafting their way to the final product of this debut here since 2011, and it shows. Solstices is a grounded, well-rounded offering of atmospheric black metal that is fully capable of making great use of groovy down-tuned doom and the most primal elements of the second wave of black metal that begat its ambient experimentation.
While there may not be a whole lot here in the way of bold, groundbreaking experimentation with the genre, Heaume Mortal make a fantastic and full-bodied variation of the style in which the coexistence of the heavier elements with the lighter ones is the standout trait. Integrating tasty, low-register grooves on cuts like the brief second track, “South of No North”, while producing explosive and engulfing onslaughts of thick, blackened atmosphere with the longer tracks “Oldborn” and “Yesteryears”, Heaume Mortal show themselves to be well-versed with both the progenitors of their core style and the workings of the other styles they integrate. And in the end, the entirely ambient closing piece, “Mestreguiral”, feels fitting and satisfying after the near 50 minutes of dynamic material before it.
Again, it’s nothing incredibly novel and it could certainly be improved upon in a few aspects, but in an age of Deafheaven copy-cats, Solstices is distinctly not a blackgaze effort, content to keep its bite frosted and its gaze consistently cold, not that there’s anything inherently wrong with what Deafheaven or their contemporaries do. It’s just nice to hear a different side of ambient black metal (an older version) being pursued by a band capable of bolstering it well with other elements of nearby subgenres and given a more high-definition production job in contrast to the intentionally lo-fi aesthetic of the genre’s pioneering records.
You know, how about a real mic for this one/10

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